I'm really late in putting up an introduction, but I'm going to excuse myself by saying that I've been really busy and am also really lazy. Also I was in the hospital for a few days and then it rained, so you know...

I'm Matt Robold. I run a small rum and cocktail website at http://rumdood.com/ where I can ramble on incessantly about various rums, how they're used in cocktails, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

I've been "in" to rum since about 2005 (I know, late to the party), when I purchased a bottle of rum in St. Lucia (Admiral Rodney) and brought it home. After finishing the bottle, I began to search for more and discovered that it wasn't imported to the US at the time (it is now or will be very soon) and stumbled across the Ministry of Rum. It was here that I caught that ever-so-communicable disease: Rum Fanatic Syndrome.

It's been 4 years since then. I've gone from 1 or 2 rums in my home bar to over 130. In 2007 I started my blog as a place where I could put my notes on different rums, figuring it would just be easy to refer to it when discussing things with the other rum nerds.

A few hundred thousand visitors, dozens of rum reviews, conferences, and interviews later, and I'm suddenly being called a connoisseur and being invited to visit distilleries and meet with master blenders and distillers and even comment on bar menus as though I know what I'm doing.

In addition to my site, I write about distillery tours for Count Silvio's Refined Vices website, as well as for the Mixoloseum blog and occasionally for a magazine here or there. I also sit on the Board of Directors of the Cocktails & Spirits Online Writers Group, which is something of a writers guild for cocktail and spirits bloggers and writers to help ensure standards and guarantee access to accurate information.